Page:Bibliography of the Sanskrit Drama.djvu/22

2 with religious festivals, and especially with the worship of Kṛṣṇa-Viṣṇu, were not unlike the early primitive Christian mystery-plays of the Middle Ages in Europe.

Whatever may have been its beginnings, it is certain that the drama flourished in India, and had a high development. The earlier plays as we know them had considerable freedom of choice of subject and treatment and they can be described, for the most part, as melodramas or tragi-comedies. Primarily their elements are mixed: gravity and gaiety, despair and joy, terror and love—all are combined in the same play. Tragedy, in our sense of the term, there is none, for every drama must have a happy ending. As, according to the rules, death cannot be represented on the stage, it follows that one great source of inspiration for European tragedy is entirely eliminated. The usual subject for dramatic treatment is love, and according to the rank or social position of the hero and heroine the play is placed in one or another of the ten chief (rūpaka) or eighteen minor (uparūpaka) divisions of the drama recognized by the Hindu text-books. The trials and tribulations of the lovers, relieved by the rather clumsy attempts at wit of the vidūṣaka, or court jester, the plotting of the viṭa, or parasite, and the efforts of the rival wives to establish themselves in the favor of their lords and masters, with the incidents of every day life in the harem and court, constitute the plot of the play. The laments of the hero to his confidant, the jester, serve to introduce lyrical stanzas descriptive of the beauties of nature, the wiles and graces of woman, and the tender passion which fills the hero's heart for some fair maiden or celestial nymph. According to the Sanskrit treatises on dramatic art the subject of a nāṭaka is to be taken from some famous legend, and its hero must be high-minded and